VTechWorks staff will be away for the Thanksgiving holiday beginning at noon on Wednesday, November 27, through Friday, November 29. We will resume normal operations on Monday, December 2. Thank you for your patience.

Browsing by Author "Lawrence, Jennifer Leigh"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    From the Trashcan to the Chicken Bucket: towards an ideology of composting
    Lane, Laura Bernadette (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-08)
    My thesis aims to unobscure the ideology of wasting through embodied storytelling, philosophical inquiry, and sociopolitical history. In particular, I take the trashcan as a material representation of an "edge of externalization" --a concept I explore throughout this thesis to describe the edges beyond which waste management networks, strategies, and failures become visible. These edges offer spaces to critically engage with the inevitabilities backed into a wasting ideology that necessitates the disconnection between nature/society. Therefore, these edges offer spaces to understand and transform the alienation of our human nature. The human relationship to waste and to the trashcans in our homes is a familiar story hidden by strategic pedagogies of obfuscation. This project seeks to replace dominant behaviorist pedagogies with an alternative "compost pedagogy," which emphasizes a process of becoming through the transformation of the trashcan. Through a reflexive and creative process, the thesis explores my personal experiences with waste in the hope that my stories will not only unobscure global systems of wasting, but that my stories of unlearning, mending, and reimagining wasting will resonate with many lived experiences.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Municipal Level Food Systems Planning for the Impacts of Climate Change
    Owen, Kasey Marie (Virginia Tech, 2023-09-06)
    Climate change poses significant risks to the food system, directly impacting food security and disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations. This study examines the critical role of local municipalities in planning for the effects of climate change on food systems through the case of the New River Valley, located in Southwestern Virginia. This study utilizes a qualitative participatory research design, including semi-structured interviews and focus groups with both food system and municipality stakeholders in the New River Valley region. Guided by Stroh's Systemic Change Process, the study seeks to advance climate adaptation planning in the region through the implementation of the first stage of the process, called "building a foundation for change." This stage involves identifying key stakeholders, getting them involved in the process, and establishing common ground. Through facilitation, stakeholders build capacity for systems thinking with a focus on collaboration. The findings of this study will inform the ongoing efforts of the Blacksburg Sustainability Department in planning for climate change transformation at a local level. This research is significant in that it addresses the gap in the literature around how municipalities are planning for climate resiliency in the food system, provides insight into the use of interviews and focus groups to bridge the creative tension gap in collaborative problem-solving through a systems thinking approach, and informs policy decisions made by local government. This study's findings have the potential to inform community-engaged efforts to plan for climate change while envisioning a more resilient and fair food system.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Political ecologies of encounter: mapping enclosures and disruptions in food access
    Byg, Reed Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-03)
    This study is an examination of the role of community-based food projects in place making and collective futuring efforts. I look specifically at food access projects in Dayton, Ohio, a city I have personal connections to. In this study, I forefront the concepts of relationality, co-creation, ownership, economic (dis)investment, soil systems, and regeneration as they emerge from my fieldwork on food access in Dayton, which consisted of interviews, participant observation, and spatial analysis. My methodology centers on critical mapping which the traces conceptual and material connections that shape food access in Dayton and situate community-based efforts within broader economic and political landscapes. In doing so, I demonstrate how food access can be conceptualized in terms of global contours and local manifestations. I draw on the work of Anna Tsing, Karl Polanyi, Jason Moore and Bikrum Gill, to develop a political ecology of encounter that examines the historical roots and ongoing practices of enclosure as a tactic of governance that shapes human-nature relations in specific ways. I demonstrate how these acts of enclosure bring to the fore certain ecological relations in ways that uphold dominant systems of power, while obfuscating other ecological relations. This allows me to theorize encounters between individuals, communities, and environments as political sites of both impasse and change. I conclude that food (in)access is a feature of the production and management of eco-social relations by governments, communities, and individuals. Thus, in focusing on the eco-social relations and encounters that are fostered through food production, distribution, and consumption, communities can (and are) working to build more socially and ecologically just futures.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: An Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives
    Crew, Melissa Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-15)
    The Green New Deal has gained international significance as the only prominent climate legislation in the United States. The Green New Deal has also become emblematic of a larger movement for climate justice; however, further analysis of the Green New Deal and its assumptions indicates that it falls short of enacting meaningful justice for those most effected by climate change, but least responsible for causing it. This shortcoming is due to the absence of calls to decolonize. Because of the large role U.S. militarism and imperialism play in contributing to the climate crisis, decolonization must be central to climate justice projects. Marx's concept of the metabolic rift and the phenomenon of humans' separation from nature through colonial acts of dispossession and enclosure of land plays an important role in thinking through the ways the Green New Deal recognizes this same phenomenon but fails to go deeper and recognize broader implications of the metabolic rift for continued U.S. imperialism. Additionally, the rocky legacy of the environmental justice movement raises questions as to whether working with the settler state can lead to meaningful justice. Though the Green New Deal is an operation of state recognition of the climate crisis as connected to other social inequalities, it does not overcome the settler state's reliance on racial capitalism and continued exploitation of people and the environment. A climate justice program that is in fact centered on decolonization and indigenous sovereignty is available and must be supported.